Caught With A Silver Shovel In Hand

January 10, 1996

In the 1980s, the federal Operation Greylord investigation of the Cook County courts unearthed scores of sleazy lawyers and judges who were sent to jail, disbarred or suspended for their misdeeds. The scope of corruption was incredible.

Yet even more remarkable was that, right when the scoundrels were heading off to jail and everyone knew that the feds were crawling all over the courts, some lawyers and judges kept fixing cases. That produced Operation Gambat, which sent more crooks off to jail.

All that invited the question: If these people were smart enough to get through law school, how come they were so dumb as to keep fixing cases when everyone around them was going off to jail?

There is no bar exam required to join the City Council, no standard of intelligence required. Even so, one has to wonder how investigators are able to pluck off aldermen with as much ease and frequency as Lake Michigan fishermen snag smelt.

The central accusation is particularly galling: that politicians took bribes to allow the illegal dumping of industrial waste in their own neighborhoods.

The one positive element is that the leaders of the city's Department of Environment apparently have made an honest, dogged and successful legal effort to stop John Christopher, the FBI mole who operated five dump sites in the city.

Those dumps have been closed; the question is who will pay for the cleanup. It will cost an estimated $15 million to clean just one site, a six-square-block expanse on the West Side filled with 600,000 cubic yards of concrete, asphalt, clay and debris that tower over the neighborhood. It must be a depressing sight for the kids who go to classes at Sumner Elementary School, right across the street from the dump.

The city officials who fought Christopher question whether the FBI's embrace of their nemesis in any way hampered their efforts. The question deserves an answer, and the feds ought to provide it.